Beautifully Unique Sparkleponies: On Myths, Morons, Free Speech, Football, and Assorted Absurdities (5 page)

Pop quiz number four: Any idea who funds the NRA? PEOPLE WHO MAKE MONEY FROM SELLING GUNS. Seriously—go look it up, it’s right on the NRA Web site.

Imagine that. A group of businesses that have vested interests in seeing that guns are easily available for people to buy supporting an organization that pushes legislation to make guns easier to buy. Despite the fact that, you know, their product is used to kill people, and
has
been used to kill people—over, and over, and over. Details, details, the devil’s always in the details.

Speaking of details, here’s an interesting one: Despite the proliferation of concealed-carry laws and the loosening of gun restrictions, in the past thirty years, not a single mass shooting has been stopped by a civilian carrying a gun (http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map). Shootings have been stopped by police officers or by the offenders suiciding, but there is not a single instance of an armed civilian putting a stop to a rampage.

Yeah, that whole bit about “If only more people carried guns, none of this would be happening”? Total bullshit. Guess who wants you to carry more guns. The people who make more guns. I wonder what possible motive they could have.

Oh, wait—I figured it out. They want to make money, and they don’t really give a fuck if people die because of it.

To be fair to the Gun Nuts, though, our problem isn’t strictly the proliferation of firearms in America (though that’s a big part of it, and we need better control over our weapons). The problem, ladies and gentlemen, is us.

As a society, we glorify gun violence in everything from movies to books to video games to television shows. We sexy it up with action scenes and history specials; we celebrate it in first-person shooters and war games; we sanitize it by not showing the consequences of what happens to a human being when a gun is used against him. Don’t show any blood, heaven forbid the children see some blood, but so long as everyone dies offscreen, you can kill as many hapless extras as you want, guns blazing the entire time. Gotta make sure you get that PG-13 rating so as many impressionable adolescents as possible can drive up your box-office revenues.

(Personal note: That last paragraph was difficult for me to write. Everyone who knows me knows I love to play video games, and I also enjoy playing first-person shooters. However, to deny the fact that they highlight an underlying problem in our society is willful blindness, and I try not to knowingly lie to myself. Honestly, we should use these games to teach consequences to our children—if you die in an FPS, that shit needs to carry some weight. Instead of you re-spawning, perhaps your console gets bricked and all your gamer-score achieve-points are deleted, or maybe you have to donate one hundred dollars to mental-health care and veteran services every time you reload. If you want to play with guns, there’s always a cost. Probably going to be tough to get that one by marketing,
though. I mean, who would want to play something that had real consequences attached to losing?

Also, parents, pay some fucking attention to what your children are playing/watching/reading. You should not be letting an eight-year-old play a mature-rated game or watch
Sons of Anarchy.
Show some common sense, and actually invest something in your kid. It’ll pay off in the long run. Back on topic.)

As a society, we see mental illness as a stigma, not a disease to be treated. We build prisons instead of hospitals, and then we wonder why someone who’s “not right in the head” does something crazy instead of getting help. We see going to therapy and counseling as signs of weakness, not as an attempt to heal a sick body part. How fucking ridiculous would it be if someone made fun of you for doing physical rehab after a knee surgery? “Ha-ha, you stupid jerk, you’re so weak. Real men just walk off their ACL tears.”

Idiotic. Yet that’s what we do! We continue to cut funding for health care, especially for mental-health issues, and we treat our mentally ill like rabid animals. We force them to live on the street, or we lock them in prison and give them no assistance, but if they want to buy a gun, it’s no questions asked, make sure you get some bullets in aisle four.

So, Gun Nuts, please, if nothing else sways you, at least think on this: Is your gun really that important to you? Is it worth another classroom of dead children? Is it worth teenagers solving their problems with bullets instead of words, cutting off forever the possibilities of life? Is it worth denying American
citizens the opportunity to have a meaningful conversation just because you’d rather support some corporation’s bottom line instead of basic human dignity and empathy?

We are killing ourselves, we are killing our neighbors, and we are killing our children, all in the name of greed and power. We can be better than this. We have to be better than this, because if we’re not, we’re murdering our future.

Bang bang.

Sincerely,

Someone Who Has Shot Several Guns,

Enjoys Playing Shooting Games, Knows Your

Slippery Slope Argument Is Utter Tripe, and

Realizes Enough Is Fucking Enough

I
’ve been struggling with how to write this piece for a while now, because it is simultaneously very simple and very complex. Here’s the simple part:

Our currency, and, by extension, our society, in its present state is worthless.

The complex part is how to explain it.

Money is a representation. In and of itself, it has minimal value (you can burn the bills for warmth, but that’s about it). We used to peg money to an arbitrary gold standard, but that’s fool’s gold (all it takes is one captured metal-rich asteroid to shatter that bubble). What money represents, what all currencies ultimately represent, is time. There are always going to be about twenty-four hours in the day here on Earth (yay leap seconds), and everyone has an equal amount of time each day that he or she is alive.

When you exchange money for a good or service, you’re
trading the time you spent doing whatever job it is that you do for the time the people you’re paying spent doing whatever it is that they do. Society places a value on how much your time is worth in relation to what you produce. Let’s look at how we value time in this country. (If you want to find these numbers, just Google
median
[
job
]
compensation.
The numbers are the closest approximations I could find; I use median because average tends to skew the numbers higher. The numbers will likely have changed from the time I wrote this piece, and I’m betting they’re not closer together.)

Median CEO salary—$9.6 million

Median NBA player salary—$2.33 million

Median NFL player salary—$770,000

Median physician salary—$278,000 (figures vary with specialties)

Median farmer/rancher salary—$60,000

Median teacher salary—$55,000

Median firefighter salary—$42,000

Median janitor salary—$22,000

So what do these numbers tell us? That for every one year a CEO works, a doctor has to work around 34, a teacher or farmer or firefighter has to work around 175, and a janitor has to work around 436.

This is ridiculous. We value the people who keep us healthy, fed, and educated far less than those who tell others what to do or those who play children’s games. You’re telling me that one year of my life spent kicking a football (I make a bit above the median) is worth almost four years of a doctor’s services? That what I do
on a football field is more important than twenty-two years of teaching classrooms of children? That someone can spend six lifetimes cleaning up after people and preventing the spread of germs and disease and still barely approach a year’s worth of shuffling stock portfolios and mergers, of making conference calls and speculating (wildly at times) on bonds and futures?

I say no. While I spend a lot of time honing my craft, there is absolutely no way what I do even comes close to benefiting society as much as the work of a doctor or a teacher or a janitor. I clean no floors; I cure no sick; I put out no fires. But society continues to pay me and people like me obscene amounts of money. People give us their time! They’re telling companies and con men, “We would rather be entertained and distracted than focus on building a better future. We would rather elect politicians who pass morality laws and tax cuts to help the rich get richer and vote for a quick fix that makes us feel good now than address the root problems of our system.”

That is why our money is worthless. We value the short term, the shallow, the parasitic leeches of society more than those who actually contribute to long-term stability and growth. We value time spent obfuscating and concealing more than time spent creating and teaching. And what’s worse is that we’ve made it a given in politics that only those who can afford to play get to run. Want to hold office? Better get that money for radio and television ads.

We’ve created a feedback loop that inevitably spirals down into oppression and decay, as those with money become ever more concerned with getting more money, more power, more control over laws and regulations until the whole house of cards comes crashing down. Take a look at the current election cycle, at the voter-ID amendments and bills being proposed, at the efforts to gradually
narrow the vote down to those who have cash. As someone who has studied history, I can tell you that every time a society places short-term gains over long-term stability, turns exclusive instead of inclusive, and resorts to petty factionalism and bickering (in this society, that means arguing over who deserves to be called a “real ’Murrican”)—well, let’s just say it doesn’t end well.

PS: Some may call me a hypocrite for being a part of the system, for entertaining rather than teaching. To you I say this: Change the system. Put me out of a job. Pay the teachers and firefighters and doctors and janitors what you pay me, and I’ll gladly do those jobs instead. Value the useful and not the merely entertaining or self-promoting; give a voice to the currently voiceless. Unfortunately, as it stands, I can operate only in the framework we’ve all created, the society that millions upon millions of Americans erect every Sunday, every election cycle, with every bailed-out bank and golden parachute funded while bridges crumble and schools shut down.

Are you not entertained?

I
f there’s one thing I’ve noticed over the years, it’s that people love to use the “it’s for the children” argument whenever they feel like they’re on shaky logical ground. I’ve seen it used in arguments against teaching evolution in schools and against gun control (/boggle), but nowhere have I seen it used more vociferously and alarmingly than in the fight against same-sex marriage.

“If the gays start getting married, how am I supposed to explain that to my children?! What do I say when two men or women walk down the street holding hands?! My children are going to be so confused by this behavior that there’s a one hundred percent chance they’ll turn gay! WON’T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!?!”

Unfortunately, what every single one of these shrieking harpies fails to realize is that they’re not, in fact, thinking of the children when they start spewing their ignorance. They’re thinking
of themselves. They’re thinking of their own inability to accept the fact that two people of the same sex might happen to love each other, but they have an inkling that if they say they can’t accept it, they’re going to be called bigots, so they mask their fear and stupidity with the strongest shield they can think of.

The children.

Well, I, for one, am tired of seeing children used to disguise bigotry. I’m tired of watching the “morally upright” teach generation after generation that it’s okay to preach vitriol and obscenity as long as you include the phrase “for the children.” Above all, I’m tired of all those people who don’t have the courage to face what’s in their own hearts and then work to change for the better, to be inclusive rather than exclusive.

That’s why I wrote my letter to Delegate Burns. That’s why I go on interviews and do podcasts, and that’s why I’m writing this book.

Because it IS about the children. It’s just not about the children in the way some people think.

It’s about homosexual parents having recourse to the same laws and access to the same benefits, the same protections, that every other heterosexual parent has access to so their children can have the same advantages and chances to succeed in life. It’s about a child not having to worry about being bullied at school or on the street because she happens to be different. It’s about a child being able to live in a stable home with parents who love each other and who just so happen to be the same sex, because every scientific study done shows no disadvantage or harm in being raised by gay parents.

It’s about giving our children the tools to succeed in life—tools like empathy and kindness. It’s about creating a nurturing
environment so our children can grow up to be whoever they want to be and not face any stigma for their choices. It’s about understanding that there are countless children and they’re not all going to be the same and that we should celebrate that diversity as they mature into adults.

It’s also about the world our children are going to live in and the attitudes of the people in it. Will our children grow up with tolerance and respect, treating others the way they’d like to be treated? Or will they grow up with discrimination and hate, divided from those around them, subject to the same stupid cycle of anger and strife, the same racism and sexism we’ve overcome before? Will they live in peace? Or will they be subject to rage and pain, the violence of the mob ever present?

So please, think of the children, but with love, not fear.

W
ell, this is awkward. I’m not one for graduation speeches, frankly, because I think most of them are a waste of perfectly good time that could be spent reading or doing something useful, and now I’ve been asked to write one. I mean, what are you supposed to tell a group of students who are getting ready to head out into the big wide world? How do you make them understand that their entire school life has been about teaching them things they didn’t know they were learning?